Almost finished today's piece, but I don't like it. I've been highlighting the abject failure of our institutions in a few recent articles: one on our uneven history of advocacy for human rights, one on the carelessness of media treating news of Saudi Arabia's oil plans as shocking, one on COP28's initial messes (this is the follow-up), and of course one on the inefficacy of the UN.
But I don't just want to repeat that all our institutions have failed, so I'm working on the proactive part now.
@MLClark It's frustrating to see our institutions fail, but the long game is, that the failure will reach a form of pressure that leads to a reform of the institution.
Entropy is a universal law. There is no perfect in this universe, for nothing remains static. Times change faster than governments and institutions do, and so occasionally, there has to be a fall, and a winter so a new spring can come.
@NiveusLepus @MLClark There are, however, strategies for accommodating the presence of entropy that do not involve doing nothing about it until something collapses, then trying to build from scratch on ashes.
We could, for instance, adopt forms of cooperative governance with shared power, with less corruption.
We could assume a stance of refining and changing methods as new information becomes available, and not thinking of each decision as final.
I could go on.
; )
The devil is in the details. ^_^ You are right that there doesn't have to be a crisis and collapse. Great movements seem to come out of nowhere, zeitgeists seize generations.
But I also consider that the Civil Rights movement of the 60s was born out of the Harlem Renaissance and the experience of Black Soldiers returning from France in WW1, as well as building off of elements of the Abolitionist and Freedmen movements of the 1800s.
It's all connected.